Please exercise caution when riding the escalator. Hold handrails and exit promptly upon reaching the landing.

Monday, March 30, 2015

I am Dubious about You, Kansas City

You might feel compelled to ask, for form’s sake, about my time in Kansas City. As you know, Kansas is a fly-over state, so why were my feet planted upon flat flat earth? And how exactly did I manage to get locked in a stairwell so shortly after arrival?

KC happened to be the second stop on a client tour. We are from the Eastern Time Zone, where all the magic happens, yet these Kansas City people refuse to change their watches to accommodate us. So when our flight landed and our iPhones reset, we realize the client meeting is an hour earlier than previously suspected and we are going to miss half of it. We hail a taxi using a weird little midwestern landline and tell the cabbie to step on it.

The client’s building is your classic office park surrounded by a sea of asphalt. We grab our luggage and hustle into the elevator. Out of the elevator. We roll up to the client receptionist. She tells us our meeting is in a conference room on the floor below. Back into the elevator. And. We can’t press the button for the floor below. You need a key card. All the way back down to the ground floor. And all the way back up to the floor with the receptionist.

She’s flustered, this receptionist, trying to figure out how to find someone with a key card to escort us back into the elevator. This is a conundrum since apparently she can’t leave her desk. I say, “Is there an ensuite stairwell we can just dash down?”

The receptionist smiles. She’s so happy someone solved her problem. She points to a door and we race toward it. With our luggage. We bump down a flight of stairs. And cannot open the door to the floor below. Because it requires a keycard. We drag our luggage back up the flight of stairs. And discover a key card is needed to get out there too.

Options Discussed:

1) Walk the whole way back down to the ground floor. (We discard on account we’d probably exit by the dumpsters and getting back in the building will prove taxing and involve patches of bare dry earth and people staring at us from their ground floor office windows.)

2) Google the number for the client front desk and call the receptionist and tell her to fucking let us out.

3) Text the client, currently conducting the meeting we are now incredibly late for, and ask him to rescue us.

As it turned out, someone entered the stairwell while we calculated our odds that someone would enter the stairwell. And she let us out on the right floor.

I flew back to New York City as fast as possible and the very next day ate a meal prepared by a chef from Kansas City. Immediately, I became dubious. But then he served some delicious carrots roasted with a beaver. I remain somewhat dubious.